It’s no secret that digitally enabled transformations have caused a major upheaval and disruption across world industries, markets, and economies. Organizations that have transformed successfully have continued to stay relevant and performed extremely well, while those that have lagged in their transformations are being forced out of business.

As numerous studies over the past few years have shown, successful digital transformations are rarely associated with the launch of a few digital projects or initiatives. Rather, it’s about a complete transformation of the organization’s processes, systems, people, and culture.

One thing is for certain. Successful transformations require stellar organizational delivery capabilities. That means, rather than simply delivering successful projects and programs, organizations need to deliver successful business outcomes, which usually involves coordination of delivery across the entire organization. In that context, here are three steps to ensure successful transformations.

1)    Optimize the organization-wide ‘PMO Process’ – Rather than merely looking at individual organizational PMOs and improving the capabilities of each one, it’s advisable to review an organization’s overall ‘PMO process’ holistically. The organization-wide ‘PMO process’ usually comprises of functions and services such as ideation, strategic alignment, initiative prioritization and approvals, architectural compliance, project and program management practices, methodologies and delivery processes, training and mentorship, and project / program handover and closure. In larger organizations, these functions and services are rarely part of one PMO but traverse various organizational PMOs, Lines of Businesses, corporate strategy, and other departments. Taking a holistic approach not only ensures that the overall process is streamlined and optimized but avoids repetition across departments and ensures that critical functions are not overlooked.

2)   Focus on delivery of business outcomes – As mentioned earlier, digital transformation initiatives are usually strategic in nature, and their success is usually beyond the scope of just one PMO. For example, the technology organization may successfully deliver the ‘systems’ portion of the transformation initiative, but the overall initiative may fail during the market launch process. It’s therefore advisable to streamline and optimize the overall delivery process with the actual business outcomes in mind rather than having each PMO optimize its specific deliverables with no one responsible for the larger business outcome view.

3)   Focus on the alignment of all delivery departments – One topic of interest in PMOs has been ‘strategic alignment’, which ensures that all approved initiatives are aligned to the overall organizational strategy. An equally important consideration is to ensure that all PMOs and other organizational delivery entities are aligned with each other to prevent frictions and failures. For example, DevOPs processes within IT departments attempt to optimally fuse the processes between development and operations. Similar integration and fusion also needs to occur between other functions (e.g., Enterprise Architecture, Corporate Risk Management, and others.) This ensures that agility and speed is applied to the overall PMO process rather than being applied selectively. Let’s not forget the overall delivery process is only as fast and agile as the slowest link.

The above recommendations are usually easier said than done. One challenge that organizations usually face is that optimization and process initiatives are usually undertaken at individual PMOs but are rarely assessed at higher levels of the organization. We will review those tips in another article.

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